In the hospital

Jessica’s mom Charlene is still in the hospital, with home nowhere in sight. While she was initially admitted for heart failure — and a malfunctioning pacemaker/defibrillator — she has recently suffered stage four kidney failure and is now undergoing dialysis. It’s all we can do now to be there for her as much as possible.

Charlene’s pacemaker/defibrillator has a faulty wire, but the doctors so far have refused to fix it. As I understand it, their reasoning is that she has been in the hospital too long, and fixing it now would likely introduce too many foreign bodies. They want her to go home first, then come back at a later date.

Yes, really.
Yes, really.

In the meantime, there is no plan to send her home anytime soon. She is in a lot of pain, and just from one meal to the next is difficult enough. She’s also pretty crabby, but all things considered, I think she has a right to be.

Schematic diagram of peritoneal dialysis
Schematic diagram of peritoneal dialysis

As for the matter of her kidney failure, the doctors are still waiting on the surgical team to decide when, or even if, they’re going to anything. If they do, though, the plan is to start Charlene on peritoneal dialysis soon. According to Wikipedia:

In peritoneal dialysis, a sterile solution containing glucose (called dialysate) is run through a tube into the peritoneal cavity, the abdominal body cavity around the intestine, where the peritoneal membrane acts as a partially permeable membrane. The peritoneal membrane or peritoneum is a layer of tissue containing blood vessels that lines and surrounds the peritoneal, or abdominal, cavity and the internal abdominal organs (stomach, spleen, liver, and intestines). Diffusion and osmosis drive waste products and excess fluid through the peritoneum into the dialysate until the dialysate approaches equilibrium with the body’s fluids. Then the dialysate is drained, discarded, and replaced with fresh dialysate.

With Charlene in the hospital, we’ve been spending what time we can there with her. Of course, Namine still has school, and Jessica works with her. Namine does much of her computer schoolwork by herself, requiring little supervision when she does. She knows what she needs to do, and does it well.

Namine is getting better at site-reading. She doesn’t have to sound out simple words any more, and she reads pretty much every sign in sight out loud. And ever since doing her lessons on rhyming words, she has been rhyming as much as possible and noticing more when words rhyme. Her handwriting is also getting better every day. Just last week she was still struggling with writing numbers with curves in them, and look at how she’s progressed.

2 responses

  1. Jen, Jeremy & Jacob Schultz Avatar
    Jen, Jeremy & Jacob Schultz

    Namine, you look adorable!!! <3

  2. Hoping she feels better soon and can go home for a bit.

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